ۗ
And when they are told to believe in what The God has sent down, they say: We believe in what was sent down to us; and they reject what is beyond it, although it is the truth, confirming what is with them. Say: Then, if you were believers, why did you previously kill The God’s prophets?
Their answer is brief, yet it reveals a deep disease: “We believe in what was sent down to us.” They do not say that they reject revelation; the problem is concealed in that very phrase, “to us.” Faith has become attached to identity rather than truth: what was sent down “to us” is acceptable, while whatever crosses that boundary is set aside.
The verse immediately exposes the contradiction: “They reject what is beyond it, although it is the truth, confirming what is with them.” What they have pushed away is not falsehood; the Qur’an calls it “the truth.” It has not even come to destroy the earlier truth they possess; it confirms what is with them. The problem is not in the message itself. Truth has crossed the self-made boundary of “us,” and that alone has become sufficient grounds for rejecting it.
“Beyond” conveys something on the other side of the boundary they have accepted. This word itself creates a picture of mental exclusivity: we accept revelation up to this point, but not beyond this boundary. It is as though The God and His religion, too, must remain enclosed within our knowledge, history, and identity.
The preceding verse identified the root of this disease as transgressive rivalry (baghy): the difficulty of accepting that The God sends down from His bounty upon whichever of His servants He wills. Now the same mentality is heard in their own words: “We believe in what was sent down to us.” The God’s bounty is acceptable, provided that it passes through the channel we expect.
This is where servanthood can be turned upside down. Instead of placing ourselves within the compass of The God’s knowledge and command, we place The God within the confines of our own knowledge and inheritance. We prescribe a route for revelation, draw boundaries for truth, and tell the owner of bounty who deserves to receive it.
The Qur’an does not answer this claim with a lengthy theoretical debate. They say that they believe in what was sent down to them; the Qur’an takes them back to the history of that very profession of faith:
“Say: Why, then, did you previously kill The God’s prophets, if you were believers?”
If you truly were believers, why did you previously kill the prophets of The God?
This is the verse’s central challenge. A claim to faith is not established by displaying the name of a book. The quality of faith becomes evident when The God’s message confronts our power, habits, interests, and assumptions. If the bearer of truth cannot be tolerated at that moment, venerating the book alone is no testimony to faith.
Al-Ma’idah 5:70 restates almost the whole of this same logic:
“Whenever a messenger came to them with what their selves did not desire, some they called liars, and some they killed.”
Whenever a messenger brought something their selves did not desire, they denied some messengers and killed others.
The problem, then, was not with the very idea of “scripture” or “prophethood.” It began when the message’s content conflicted with desire, the structure of power, or established beliefs. The book remains sacred; but the bearer of a message that brings that book to life against our deviation becomes intolerable.
This Qur’anic accusation does not rest solely on an Islamic account of history. The Hebrew Bible itself preserves clear examples of the killing of The God’s messengers within the communities of Israel and Judah.
In 2 Chronicles 24:20–22, Zechariah son of Jehoiada, after warning the people and the king for abandoning The God’s command, is stoned at the king’s command in the courtyard of the house of The God. This person should not be identified without evidence with Zechariah, the father of John; the importance of the example is that the Hebrew inheritance itself records the killing of a divine messenger by a community possessing scripture.
In Jeremiah 26:20–23, Uriah son of Shemaiah, like Jeremiah, warns against the condition of the city and the land. King Jehoiakim seeks to kill him; Uriah flees to Egypt, is brought back, and is killed with the sword.
1 Kings 18 also speaks of the killing of The God’s prophets by Jezebel; and Nehemiah 9:26, in reviewing the people’s history, explicitly acknowledges that they cast The God’s law behind their backs and killed the prophets who warned them in order to bring them back.
The Qur’an’s question is therefore not imposed on them from outside. Their own inheritance also shows that possessing scripture does not automatically make a community obedient to it.
The sacred book may remain, the place of worship may flourish, and religious language may be heard everywhere; yet when the message of that same God speaks against our deviation, its bearer may be eliminated. This is the contradiction the verse seeks to expose.
There is no new prophet or messenger among us today, and no writer, philosopher, or reformer should be placed on the same level as the prophets of this verse. Yet the disease the verse reveals has not disappeared. When a human reading of religion becomes so sacred that criticizing it is treated as criticizing The God, the critic is no longer simply someone with a different idea; they become a “heretic,” an “apostate,” an “atheist,” or an “enemy of religion.” From that point, the distance between rejecting a statement and eliminating its speaker becomes short.
Muslim history contains painful examples of this same logic.
Sa‘id ibn Jubayr, a prominent scholar of the generation after the Companions, was killed on the orders of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. His conflict with the Umayyad establishment had a serious political background, but that reality alone is enough for our purposes: a power that considered itself Muslim put a Muslim scholar to death. The name of Islam did not prevent bloodshed within Muslim society.
Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922. His case was a complex mixture of politics, mysticism, and religious accusations; that very complexity matters. Political power and religious judgment converged at a point where the continued presence of a way of thinking was considered intolerable.
Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi, the founder of Illuminationist philosophy, was killed in Aleppo in 1191. Jurists’ opposition to his ideas and the decision of political power came together in his fate. A philosopher who could have received an intellectual response was removed through elimination.
In the modern period, Ahmad Kasravi was killed inside Tehran’s courthouse in 1946 by members of Fada’iyan-e Islam. His criticism of institutional Shi‘ism, the clergy, and prevailing beliefs was not met only with books and argument; declarations of unbelief and violence led to the killing of him and his assistant.
Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a Muslim thinker in Sudan, challenged the prevailing reading of religious law. Jaafar Nimeiri’s government hanged him in 1985 on a charge of apostasy. Disagreement over the understanding of religion was transformed, through state power, into a death sentence.
Farag Foda, in Egypt, strongly opposed political Islamism and religious government. He was assassinated by extremists in 1992. Once again, an idea was answered with bullets instead of ideas.
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was not killed, but his Qur’anic research led to a ruling of apostasy and forced separation from his wife, ultimately driving him to leave Egypt. His example shows that the logic of elimination does not always end in killing; sometimes courts, declarations of unbelief, and exile perform the same function.
Salman Rushdie, too, lived for decades under a death ruling and threats, and in 2022 was attacked with a knife while speaking, losing one eye. Accepting or rejecting his writing is a separate matter; the issue here is that criticism of a book was not answered with criticism of a book, but the killing of its author was proposed as a religious response.
These people were not prophets, and their words were not revelation. We may have serious disagreements with many of their ideas. The comparison concerns neither their rank nor their status; it concerns the manner of responding to speech that challenges the dominant belief. The Qur’an does not ask us to consider every critic correct; it teaches us not to establish our own claim to truth by silencing an opposing voice.
This disease is neither Sunni nor Shi‘i, and belongs neither exclusively to the third century nor to the twentieth. Wherever human opinion becomes sacred in place of revelation, criticism of it can be treated as “rejection of religion.” There the way opens to declaring others unbelievers, after which prison, exile, and killing are no longer very far away.
We, too, can confidently say: “We believe in what was sent down to us”; we possess the Qur’an, we are Muhammad’s community, we hold the final Book. But the verse offers no reassurance based on names. It turns the same question back upon us: what do we do with a truth that criticizes our own inheritance?
If a report conflicts with the Qur’an, do we re-examine the report or restrict the Qur’an? If a legal ruling is incompatible with “There is no compulsion in religion,” which one do we reinterpret? If the machinery of declaring others unbelievers clashes with the inviolability of life and individual responsibility before The God, does the Qur’an remain the criterion, or does the system to which we have grown accustomed over centuries?
A jurist’s opinion, a hadith report, exegesis, theology, and a legal system are all products of human efforts to understand religion. They may be right, and they may be wrong. The danger begins when human understanding acquires the same standing as revelation, and criticism of it is counted as enmity toward The God.
From that point onward, someone may use a Qur’anic verse to question a human ruling, yet instead of the ruling being investigated, a case is opened against the critic.
Qur’anic history must not become a means for us to taunt earlier people. If we merely say, “The Children of Israel killed their prophets,” while failing to see our own history of declarations of unbelief, executions, and intellectual exclusion, the same blind spot has become active again. We have correctly seen their error, yet lost the wisdom of recounting it.
The verse’s ending breaks precisely this security based on identity:
“If you were believers.”
Faith is not merely what we say about ourselves. It must withstand the test of how we treat truth, a critic, and the bearer of an unwelcome statement.
Scripture is a criterion of guidance only when we allow it to expose our own errors as well. If we accept revelation only insofar as it endorses our inherited beliefs and religious power, we are no longer submitting to the Book; we have imprisoned the Book within our own boundaries. And if the response to criticism of an idea is to declare its critic an unbeliever and eliminate them, we have read the history of the prophets while living by the logic of their killers.